Introduction:

In the words
of Shusterman, ‘France’s leading living
social theorist’ (Shusterman 1999: 1), Pierre Bourdieu is, along with Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential of those French
thinkers ‘whose work succeeded structuralism’ (Calhoun et al. 1993: 7). There
are few aspects of contemporary cultural theory (which crosses fields such as
cultural studies, literary studies, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, gender
studies, psychoanalysis and film and media studies) to which Bourdieu has not
made a significant contribution. His concepts of habitus, field and capital,
for instance, constitute what is arguably the most significant and successful
attempt to make sense of the relationship between objective social structures
(institutions, discourses, fields, ideologies) and everyday practices (what
people do, and why they do it). Most of the ‘big’ theoretical issues being
debated and explored in the world of contemporary theory gender and
subjectivity, the ‘production’ of the body, communicative ethics, the public
sphere and citizenship, the politics of cultural literacy, the relationship
between capitalism, culture and cultural consumption, ‘ways of seeing’, the
transformation of society through the forces of globalisation—are to some
extent explicable in terms of, and have benefited from, Bourdieu’s
‘technologies’ of habitus, field and capital.

Being heavily
influenced by philosophers like Martin Heidegger and the phenomenologist Ponty,
Bourdieu became interested in structuralist anthropology by Claude
Levi-Strauss.

Anthropology
and allied:However,
his dissatisfaction with the inability of structuralist anthropology to take
into account or make sense of the practical (and strategic) dimensions of
everyday life led to two of his most famous critiques of anthropology, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977a)
and The Logic of Practice (1990b).

On
education: His works on education focused on
the role that secondary and tertiary education play in reproducing social and
cultural classification and stratification; the ‘education’ books that have
attracted most attention in the English-speaking world include Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977b) and Homo Academicus (1988)

On
culture and gender: Perhaps the best known
of his books in English, Distinction: A
Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), is an empirically based
critique of Kantian aesthetics. More recently, Bourdieu has extended his
interest in the field of cultural production by writing the strongly polemical On Television (1998c); and this more
openly ‘interventionist’ approach has also resulted in books on the
politicising of arts funding (Free Exchange (1995), with the German artist Hans
Haacke), gender relations, in Masculine
Domination (2001), the everyday pressures and predicaments of lower class
groups in contemporary France in the multi-authored The Weight of the World (1999a) and globalisation and the withdrawal of
the state from social life, in Acts of
Resistance: against the New Myths of our Time (1998b).

More
recent works:He has
recently written three books—Practical Reason: on the Theory of Action (1998d),
Pascalian Meditations (2000) and Masculine Domination (2001)—which clarify and
elaborate upon, in a quite personal way, his work, methodologies, theories and
relations to different fields such as philosophy, history and sociology.

To understand
Bourdieu’s version of structuralism we need to look upon two aspects of
Saussure’s work are important. First, his distinction between the grammatical
or logical structure of language (langue) and the everyday, improvisational
hurly-burly of speech (parole), together with his insistence that the former is
the appropriate domain for the location and analysis of meaning, laid the
foundation for the structuralist method: the true nature of social phenomena as
relational systems of meaning is to be sought in structure, which lies somehow
behind or beneath the phenomenal world of appearances. Second, he argued that
aspects of culture or social life other than language could also be treated as
systems for the signification of meaning, each with an appropriate structure or
structures to be revealed or deciphered.

Bourdieu refers
to the contexts—discourses, institutions, values, rules and regulations—which
produce and transform attitudes and practices as ‘cultural fields’. For him the
cultural field operates through cultural
capital, illusion, universalisation, symbolic violence and misrecognition.

A cultural field
can be defined as a series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions,
categories, designations, appointments and titles which constitute an objective
hierarchy, and which produce and authorise certain discourses and activities.
But it is also constituted by, or out of, the conflict which is involved when
groups or individuals attempt to determine what constitutes capital within that
field, and how that capital is to be distributed. Bourdieu understands the
concept of cultural field to refer to fluid and dynamic, rather than static,
entities. Cultural fields, that is, are made up not simply of institutions and
rules, but of the interactions between institutions, rules and practices.

The definition
of capital is very wide for Bourdieu and includes material things (which can
have symbolic value), as well as ‘untouchable’ but culturally significant
attributes such as prestige, status and authority (referred to as symbolic
capital), along with cultural capital (defined as culturallyvalued taste and
consumption patterns)...For Bourdieu, capital acts as a social relation within
a system of exchange, and the term is extended ‘to all the goods, material and
symbolic, without distinction, that present themselves as rare and worthy of
being sought after in a particular social formation’. (Harker et al. 1990: 1)

Bourdieu
explains the competition for capital within fields with reference to two terms,
reproduction and transformation. By and large, agents adjust their expectations
with regard to the capital they are likely to attain in terms of the
‘practical’ limitations imposed upon them by their place in the field, their
educational background, social connections, class position and so forth.
Consequently—and to a certain extent, paradoxically—those with the least amount
of capital tend to be less ambitious, and more ‘satisfied’ with their lot; in
Bourdieu’s terms, ‘the subjective hope of profit tends to be adjusted to the
objective probability of profit’ (2000: 216). What this leads to is a
reproduction of symbolic domination:

What Bourdieu describes as: the realistic, even resigned or fatalistic,
dispositions which lead members of the dominated classes to put up with
objective conditions that would be judged intolerable or revolting by agents
otherwise disposed...help to reproduce the conditions of oppression. (2000:
217)

This feature however, does not stop agencies
from gambling for capital in order to improve their position within a field.
For example a lowly academic can become famous if s/he has a chance to write a
column in a reputed news paper. This might encourage many underclasses to join
academia, however according to Bourdieu, this kind of gambling is doomed to
failure. Although a lower class migrant family may strive to get its children
educated, the habitus of the children will, in advance, disqualify them from
success, both in the sense that the children will signal, in everything they do
and say, their unsuitability for higher education, and as a corollary, the
children will themselves recognise this, and more or less expect failure. As
Bourdieu writes: ‘Those who talk of equality of opportunity forget that social
games...are not “fair games”. Without being, strictly speaking, rigged, the
competition resembles a handicap race that has lasted for generations’ (2000:
214–15).

Bourdieu understands misrecognition as a
‘form of forgetting’ that agents are caught up in, and produced by. He writes:

The agent
engaged in practice knows the world...too well, without objectifying distance,
takes it for granted, precisely because he is caught up in it, bound up with it;
he inhabits it like a garment...he feels at home in the world because the world
is also in him, in the form of the habitus (2000: 142–3)

Misrecognition is the key to what Bourdieu calls the function of
‘symbolic violence’, which he defines as ‘the violence which is exercised upon
a social agent with his or her complicity’ (1992d: 167). In other words, agents
are subjected to forms of violence (treated as inferior, denied resources,
limited in their social mobility and aspirations), but they do not perceive it
that way; rather, their situation seems to them to be ‘the natural order of
things’. One of the more obvious examples of the relation between
misrecognition and symbolic violence can be seen in the way gender relations
have, historically, been defined in terms of male domination. Every aspect of
women’s bodies and activities was ‘imprisoned’, to some extent, by the workings
of the habitus. Female bodies were both read as having significance which
demonstrated their inferiority (they were weak, soft, unfit for hard work,
unable to take pressure), and were inculcated (at home, school, church) with a
‘bodily hexis that constitutes a veritable embodied politics’ (1992d: 172).

Patriarchy, in this account, cannot be understood simply in terms of
coercion by one group (men) of another (women). Rather, we can say that gender
domination took (and takes) place precisely because women misrecognised the
symbolic violence to which they were subjected as something that was natural,
simply ‘the way of the world’. Consequently they were complicit in the
production of those things (bodily performances, for instance) which worked to
reinscribe their domination. Of course, as cultures change, there is always the
prospect that men can be caught up in the same form of imprisonment; that is,
maintain an attachment to certain performances of masculinity which are no
longer acceptable or functional, and thus counterproductive.

This more or less unthinking commitment to the logic, values and
capital of a field corresponds to what Bourdieu calls ‘illusio’, which is:

The fact of
being caught up in and by the game, of believing . . . that playing is worth
the effort …, to participate, to admit that the game is worth playing and that
the stakes created in and through the fact of playing are worth pursuing; it is
to recognise the game and to recognise its stakes. When you read, in
Saint-Simon, about the quarrel of hats (who should bow first), if you were not
born in a court society, if you do not possess the habitus of a person of the
court, if the structures of the game are not also in your mind, the quarrel will
seem ridiculous and futile to you. (1998d: 76–7)

Thus, for example the rule in atheletics, which forbids
sports personnel to take any money in exchange of their sporting activities in
Olympics, however, there is nothing to stop them to take travelling expenses
and other facilities including high paid government or corporate jobs. When the
Spanish amateur champion Manuel Santana was asked, privately, why he did not
turn professional, he replied that he couldn’t afford the drop in salary.
Brundage, being international president of Olympic Games, initiated Olympic
movement – to universalise itself so that its values would become synonymous
with the field as a whole. The so-called ‘Olympic ideals’, which emphasise
disinterested values (‘sport for sport’s sake’), were reproduced by
governments, the media, bureaucrats, sports administrators and teachers as
criteria (capital) for differentiating ‘true’ sportspeople. This had a number
of manifestations. In the United States in the first half of the twentieth
century, professional American football received very little media coverage or
public attention compared to (supposedly) amateur college football. And amateur
tennis players who won tournaments like Wimbledon became national heroes, while
the professional circuit, dubbed ‘a circus’, was more or less ignored by the
media. In both cases the professionals were much better sportspeople than those
in the amateur ranks, but this did not translate into cultural (or even
economic) capital. The Olympic movement’s attempts to universalise its values
and capital were not, of course, universally successful. In some sub-fields
(such as golf, soccer and boxing), professionals were generally accorded a
higher status, and received more media and public attention, than amateurs. And
in rugby league (a sport played predominantly in the north of Britain and
eastern Australia), professionalism became the means by which the sport and its
working class fans distinguished themselves from a rival code (rugby union) and
its supporters (the upper classes). But even where a sport was clearly
professional (golf, soccer, boxing, rugby league), its core values and
discourses—what Bourdieu would call its ‘doxa’—were usually articulated (by the
media, officials, and by sportspersons giving interviews) as being tied to the
notion of ‘sport for sport’s sake’. This is another example of illusio:
although by the middle of the last century many sports were operating on a
professional basis (soccer in Europe and South America, golf and tennis in the
United States and Europe), most members of the field were still ‘spoken’ by the
discourses of what we might call ‘inalienable sport’.

Inalienable
culture and market:

When we refer to sport as ‘inalienable’, we mean that
it was supposedly above the values of the marketplace. Soccer players earned
high salaries, and were treated—and sold—by clubs as a form of commodity. But
if an English soccer star in the 1950s were interviewed about his reasons for
playing the game, he would invariably cite a number of motivations—glory,
representing his country, helping his teammates, pleasing the local supporters,
even just having fun, all of which might be true. What he could not say,
however, was that he was doing it for the money; that would have automatically
earned him the contempt and anger of the fans and everyone else in the field.
The only capital that a soccer player could legitimately refer to was inalienable
cultural capital such as international honour, longevity, skill, loyalty to a
team or town, toughness or a sense of fair play.

Most of the
fields in which Bourdieu has worked, such as sociology, anthropology, ethnography
and linguistics, have been split between objectivist and subjectivist
explanations of human practice. In his introduction to The Logic of practice, Bourdieu writes that ‘Of all the oppositions
that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most
ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism’
(1990b: 25). The notions of cultural field and the habitus were created’ by
Bourdieu primarily as a means of thinking beyond this subjectivist–objectivist
split. What do the terms ‘subjectivist’ and ‘objectivist’ actually mean? Loïc
Wacquant describes subjectivism, or the subjectivist point of view, as that
which:

Asserts that
social reality is a ‘contingent ongoing accomplishment’ of competent social
actors who continually construct their social world via ‘the organized artful
practices of everyday life’...Through the lens of this social phenomenology,
society appears as the emergent product of the decisions, actions, and
cognitions of conscious, alert individuals to whom the world is given as
immediately familiar and meaningful. (1992d: 9)

The most common example of this way of thinking is Hollywood action
movies starring Arnold Scwarzeneggar where, they are usually in control of
their ideas, thoughts and behaviours, and they determine their environment through
the strength of their will and their physical ability. In fact in most of
Schwarzenegger’s films (and in action films starring actors such as Sylvester
Stallone and Bruce Willis) the story is really about the battle between the
individual hero who is courageous, strong, principled and free thinking, and
his environment which is invariably bureaucratic, deterministic, dehumanised,
corrupted and narrow minded. Bourdieu accepts that subjectivism is useful in
that it draws attention to the ways in which agents, at a practical, everyday
level, negotiate various attempts (by governments, bureaucracies, institutions,
capitalism) to tell them what to do, how to behave, and how to think. In other
words it serves as an antidote to those Marxist theories (associated with the
Frankfurt School) which presume that people are ‘cultural dupes’ mindlessly
consuming the ideologies of government and capitalism.

Bourdieu, however, rejects the subjectivist approach because it
fails to take in to account the close connection between the objective
structure of culture and which include the values, ideas, desires and
narratives produced by, and characteristic of, cultural institutions such as
the family, religious groups, education systems and government bodies, on the
one hand, and the specific tendencies, activities, values and dispositions of
individuals, on the other.

Objectivism is useful for Bourdieu because it allows him to decode
‘the unwritten musical score according to which the actions of agents, each of
whom believes she is improvising her own melody, are organized’ (1992d: 8). The
best known body of objectivist theory is structuralism, which was practiced in,
and influenced, just about every major humanities and social sciences discipline,
including linguistics (Saussure and Jakobson), anthropology (Lévi-Strauss),
literature (the Russian Formalists), cultural studies (Barthes), Marxism
(Althusser) and psychoanalysis (Lacan).

Structuralism as Bourdieu sees it:

There are three main insights which Bourdieu takes from
structuralism, and which clearly influenced his notions of cultural field and
the habitus.

First, structuralist
accounts of practice start from the premise that people more or less reproduce
the objective structures of the society, culture or community they live in, and
which are articulated in terms of ideas, values, documents, policies, rituals,
discourses, relations, myths and dispositions. The catch cry of structuralism
was Lévi-Strauss’ observation that ‘myths think in men, unbeknown to them’
(Hawkes 1997: 41). In other words, while people think that they are employing
various modes of communication (‘sign systems’ such as written and spoken
language, or bodily gestures), in fact those sign systems produce them, and their
activities, thoughts and desires.

Second, sign systems not
only ‘think’ people into existence; they also determine how they perceive the
world. What this means is that ‘reality’ is both produced and delimited by
whatever sign systems we have at our disposal. In contemporary society we
perceive and understand people aged, say thirteen years and under, in terms of
the word ‘child’. This connotes a number of things, including distinguishing
that person from an adult. But as the French historian Philippe Aries has
pointed out, what we understand by that word did not exist in the sixteenth
century; up to then twelve-year-olds would have been viewed and treated as
miniature adults.

The third point Bourdieu takes from
structuralism is the notion of relational thinking. Reality and people are
‘processed’ through the meaning machines that constitute our sign systems; but
the signs in those systems mean nothing in themselves; they only ‘mean’ insofar
as they are part of a sign system, and can be related to other signs in that
system. For instance, the term ‘Coca Cola’ does not derive its meaning from any
real thing that is out there in the world. Rather, we understand ‘Coca Cola’ in
relation to other terms, called ‘binaries’ (‘Coca Cola’ means, among other things,
not ‘Pepsi’, not ‘Perrier’, not ‘yak juice’).

These three points can be summed up as
follows:

·objective structures produce
people, their subjectivities, their

worldview; and,
as a consequence

·they also produce what people
come to know as the ‘reality’

of the world;
and

·every thing, object and idea
within a culture only has meaning

in relation to
other elements in that culture.

Structuralism
therefore, can be understood as a form of objectivism, where it sets out to
establish objective regularities independent of individual consciousness and
will. It raises objectively at least the forgotten question of the particular
conditions which makes doxic experience of the social world possible.

The deterministic
aspect of human practice as Bourdieu sees has the ability to see practice as
only the reproduction of structures and no more. The most prominent short
coming as he sees it is in what stereotypic anthropologists does. Anthropologists
seeking out primitive culture objectivise “other” in terms of their own
cultural notions. In sum, anthropologists objectifying other culture fail to
objectify their own practices.

The second and
even more acute problem that Bourdieu sees is that failing to understand that descriptions
of objective regularities (That is, structures, laws, systems) do not tell us
how people use—inhabit, negotiate, or elude—those objective regularities.

Subjectivism and
objectivism remain useful notions in attempting to account for practice, mainly
because they point to the shortcomings of their ‘other’. Subjectivism draws
attention to the point that objectivist maps of a culture (such as laws, rules,
and systems) edit out intentionality and individuality (or what is referred to
as ‘agency’). Objectivism points out that individuality and intentionality are
regulated by cultural contexts—that is, we can only ‘intend’ what is available
to us within a culture.

Bourdieu refers
to the partly unconscious ‘taking in’ of rules, values and dispositions as ‘the
habitus’, which he defines as ‘the durably installed generative principle of
regulated improvisations . . . [which produces] practices’ (1977a: 78). In
other words, habitus can be understood as the values and dispositions gained
from our cultural history that generally stay with us across contexts (they are
durable and transposable). These values and dispositions allow us to respond to
cultural rules and contexts in a variety of ways (because they allow for
improvisations), but the responses are always largely determined—regulated—by
where (and who) we have been in a culture.

As agents move
through and across different fields, they tend to incorporate into their
habitus the values and imperatives of those fields. And this is most clearly
demonstrated in the way the relationship between field and habitus functions to
‘produce’ agent’s bodies and bodily dispositions: what Bourdieu refers to as
the ‘bodily hexis’. We may think of the body as something individual, as
subject to, belonging to, and characteristic of, the self. But, as Bourdieu
points out, this notion of the ‘individual, self-contained body’ is also a
product of the habitus:

this body which
indisputably functions as the principle of individuation . . ., ratified and reinforced
by the legal definition of the individual as an abstract, interchangeable being
. . . [is] open to the world, and therefore exposed to the world, and so
capable of being conditioned by the world, shaped by the material and cultural
conditions of existence in which it is placed from the beginning...(2000:
133–4)

There are a number of further points that Bourdieu associates with
habitus

First, knowledge (the way
we understand the world, our beliefs and values) is always constructed through
the habitus, rather than being passively recorded.

Second, we are disposed
towards certain attitudes, values or ways of behaving because of the influence
exerted by our cultural trajectories. These dispositions are transposable
across fields.

Third, the habitus is always
constituted in moments of practice. It is always ‘of the moment’, brought out
when a set of dispositions meets a particular problem, choice or context. In
other words, it can be understood as a ‘feel for the game’ that is everyday
life.

Finally, habitus operates
at a level that is at least partly unconscious. Why? Because habitus is, in a
sense, entirely arbitrary; there is nothing natural or essential about the
values we hold, the desires we pursue, or the practices in which we engage.

Social capital
is an aspiration to those who want to strengthen neither the state nor the
market but something in between that is the civil society. In the beginning it
was less a matter of voluntary participation but broader view of the effects of
social networks. The social capital debate met with enormous interest, as
‘‘discovering’’ and describing a new resource arouses desires. Theoretically,
however, a minimum of social capital should be a guarantee for democratic and
economic development. It was Robert D. Putnam[1]
who ﬁrst held this position and he gave reasons for it in the book, Making
Democracy Work, that he wrote together with Robert Leonardi and Rafaela Y.
Nanetti. The decisive impulse for this debate was, however, given by an essay
in the Journal of Democracy (Putnam, 1995[2];
Paxton, 1999[3]:
89).

Putnam’s (1993)
analysis of democracy based on the example of Italy is seen as a milestone in
democracy research (Tarrow, 1996)[4] because
Putnam succeeded in combining historical, cultural, and institutional research
to create an independent new approach for explaining democratic stability and
economic prosperity through civic engagement. Later on several social
scientists like Bourdieu, Coleman, or Loury have proposed definitions which are
subsequently used.

Pierre Bourdieu
differentiated between three types of capital. In addition to economic capital,
according to Marx the ‘‘actual’’ capital, he recognized cultural and social
capital as being responsible for the structure of inequality in a society (Bourdieu,
1986)[5].
The allocation of cultural capital is determined above all by family origin; it
refers to the access and the practicing of class and stratum-speciﬁc knowledge
components and skills (e.g., performing music and learning classical languages
are mentioned speciﬁcally), as well as style and taste. Children from
underclass milieus thus lack not only economic, but also cultural, capital. In addition
they also lack the necessary social capital for breaking out of their status.
According to Bourdieu social capital consists primarily of the social networks
of family and relationships. The necessary contacts and connections are
generally more important for achieving a rewarding position in society than
economic and cultural capital. In contrast, Putnam’s deﬁnition starts at a
different level: ‘‘By analogy with notions of physical capital and human
capital...‘social capital’ refers to features of social organization such as
networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation
for mutual beneﬁt’’ (Putnam, 1995: 67[6]).
While social capital is assigned to a person (or family) by Bourdieu, Putnam
locates it in the public sphere: ‘‘Social capital ... is ...ordinarily a public
good, unlike conventional capital, which is ordinarily a private good’’
(Putnam, 1993: 170[7]).
According to Putnam, Bourdieu’s three forms of capital (including his deﬁnition
of social capital) can therefore all be assigned to human capital (material
values and the ‘‘infrastructure’’ belong to physical capital).

Even if it is
separated from the attribution to persons, Putnam’s concept of social capital
is hardly compatible with Coleman’s deﬁnition. In the late 1980s Coleman worked
on the operational requirements for social capital, whereby he picked up on
earlier work by Loury (1977) on education and income. In regard to social
advancement, Loury paid special attention to the social embedding in addition
to individual capabilities and established this as a new ﬁeld of research. ‘‘It
may thus be useful to employ a concept of social capital to represent the
consequences of social position in facilitating acquisition of the standard
human capital characteristics’’ (Loury, 1977[8]:
176). Coleman leaves out this task by connecting different analysis levels and
describes social capital in domination and trust relationships and as a
phenomenon of collective action (free rider problem etc.). In doing so, social
capital becomes a good which, in terms of general economic exchange theory, is
explainable according to the standards of rational choice models. Social
capital is thereby both a result and a resource in exchange relations, thus an
individual characteristic and a good that varies according to the social situation:
‘‘Social capital is defined by its function. It is not a single entity, but a
variety of different entities having two characteristics in common: They all
consist of some aspect of social structure, and they facilitate certain actions
of individuals who are within the structure. Like other forms of capital,
social capital is productive, making possible the achievement of certain ends
that would not be attainable in its absence’’ (Coleman, 1990: 302[9]).
Any kind of structural determination should explain the operational
requirements for social capital that in the end, however, remains tied to
individual persons. The network approaches of Ronald Burt (Burt, 1984, 1987,
1992[10])
and Nan Lin (1982 see also: Lin et al., 2001[11])
have a similar point of origin. Social capital arises here from relationships
between (at least) two persons (‘‘knots’’ in a network) and is conceived
through the variables information and control, which can only arise through the
relationship between the knots. One could now ask to which extent certain forms
of networks offer more or less social capital for the individual. This also
ties up with the approach of Mark social capital Granovetter (1973[12]),
who drew attention to a peculiarity of networks in his much acclaimed article
‘‘The Strength of Weak Ties.’’ Many loose contacts appear to be more favourable
for the structure of a network than a few close relationships. At the same time
it also dealt with the use of networks at the individual level. He looked at
what positions in networks and types of relationships are especially advantageous,
e.g., when looking for a job (Granovetter, 1974[13]).
None of these approaches and deﬁnitions touched off such a strong public
interest in the concept of social capital as did Putnam’s deﬁnition. For
Putnam, neither the sociology of inequality implications (as by Bourdieu),
personal advantage (as by Burt and Lin), the action theory problems at the
level of the participants (as by Coleman), nor the use for the network itself
(as by Granovetter) is relevant. For Putnam it is the environment of the
networks, as far as possible the society, that possesses social capital. For
this purpose Putnam starts with concrete, localizable places, as Jane Jacobs
(1961[14])
and Lydia J. Hanifan (1920[15])
did before him. Typical, culturally anchored social relationship structures are
sought there. We are thus dealing with a space-related approach that differs
from personal approaches. It is Putnam’s space related approach that has formed
the actual and general deﬁnition of social capital more strongly that the
participant-based approaches. This appears, e.g., in the ofﬁcial deﬁnitions of
the World Bank and the OECD. For the World Bank, any kind of sources and
conditions for economic development are interesting. The concept of the World Bank understands
social capital to be – in an obvious allusion to Putnam’s deﬁnition – the social
coherence of societies, especially basic normative principles of trust:
‘‘Social capital refers to the norms and networks that enable collective
action. Increasing evidence shows that social cohesion ‘social capital’ is
critical for poverty alleviation and sustainable human and economic
development’’ (The World Bank, 1998[16]).
Informal, intermediary, and formal organizations are not differentiated here.
According to the World Bank deﬁnition, social capital consists of all
institutions, relationships, and norms that develop an inﬂuence on the quality
and quantity of social interaction. The goal of the World Bank is to use the potential
for an increase in social and economic growth that is attributed to social
capital and the deﬁnition turns out to be correspondingly broad. The OECD
pursues a similar concept, especially for developmental aid and advice. In the
concept of social capital used there, the social environment in which economic
growth should take place is allowed for. The inclusion of different
organizational forms in the deﬁnition of social capital (from national,
regional, and local organizations to NGOs and small neighborhood mutual aid
associations) is intended to facilitate the cooperation between and in
different groups. A loss of social capital must be counteracted by the OECD
because otherwise no endogenous development would be possible and permanent aid
and (exogenous) administrative interventions would remain permanently
necessary.

Issues:

One of the most
important issues in the study of social capital is the question of relationships
and trust attributed to the members of civil society. The nature of
relationship also becomes important. Quite obviously, we can neither treat every
form of relationship (marriage, friendship, exchange relationship, slavery) nor
every form of association (club, company, cooperative, army, religious community,
administrative bureaucracy, Maﬁa) equally. With regard to social capital we
always think of voluntary forms of relationships and groups that in some way
operate positively. In the simplest terms identifying a civil society as something
brought forth by non profit organisations appears easy, however, it becomes
more difficult once, one tries to find out which organisations, networks and
actions tend to support or not support the pursuits of the development of
modern society.

Putnam (1993,
1995) starts not with organizations, but ‘‘dense networks’’ und ‘‘networks of
organized reciprocity,’’ which make possible and stabilize economic growth and
democratic development: ‘‘In fact, historical analysis suggested
that...networks of organized reciprocity and civic solidarity, far from being
an epiphenomenon of socioeconomic modernization, were a precondition for it’’
(Putnam, 1995: 67). He argues that the forms of network are important
contributor to civility. For Unites States Putnam (1995) finds a steady decline
in these forms. He argues that four factors are responsible for these: the
increased employment of women, the increased mobility, the generational change
and the increased spread of technology in leisure time (increased television
consumption). These four developments disrupt face-to-face contacts in the
communities and lead to more individual or isolated activities being carried
out. However, many others like Wuthnow, (2001)[17]
argue that increase in employment ensures better civility and that mobility
does not automatically breaks down relationships. While Postman (1985)[18]
presents a complex effect of mass media rather than simple breaking down of
relationships because of TV consumption, Putnam is accorded as having occupied
a position of antimodernist. However, Putnam more recently argues that ‘‘The
level of social engagement is higher among affluent housewives than among other
woman – they spend more time visiting friends, entertaining at home, attending
club meetings and so on’’ (Putnam, 2000: 202[19]).

Mobility, like
frequent repotting of plants, tends to disrupt root systems, and it takes time
for an uprooted individual to put down new roots. It seems plausible that the
automobile, suburbanization, and the movement to the Sun Belt have reduced the
social rootedness of the average American ...’’

(Putnam, 1995:
75). If we follow this biologistic reporting-analogy increased mobility would
always lead to an erosion of social capital. As a whole in ‘‘Bowling Alone’’ he
laments the decrease of the bonding social capital. These forms of
relationships are similar to the Gemeinschaft (in terms of To¨nnies) formed
around the ‘‘essential, organic, or natural will’’ (To¨nnies: ‘‘Wesenswillen’’)
of the participants. This contradicts the ﬁndings of network theory which
tended to see loose ties, heterogenic, and nonredundant groups to be more
successful for the bridging social capital. This would tend to correspond more
to the arbitrary-will (Ku¨rwillen) that T¨onnies ascribed to the relationships
in modern societies (Gesellschaften). Thus a considerable doubt arises about
the traditionalistic understanding of social capital and the thus predicted
decline through ﬂexibilization and individualization. The way in which network
structures that produce bridging social capital can develop in modernly
structured civil societies must be empirically clariﬁed.

Club
memberships, commitment, and trust are generally used as indicators for social
capital. In a comprehensive overview of the standard quantitative research on
social capital up to now, Tristan Claridge (only available on the Internet:
www.gnudung.com) shows that most studies refer both to individual aspects and
to several aspects of the deﬁnition of social capital. Thus, for example, Cox,
and Caldwell (2000), Glaeser et al. (2000) and Newton (2001) suggest using the
variable trust to show social capital O’Connell (2003), Price (2002), Warde et
al. (2003) and Wollebaek and Selle (2003) measure on the other hand above all
memberships in formal organizations. Lappe et al. (1997), Lochner et al. (2003)
and Veenstra (2002) use both variables. Isham et al. (2002), Skrabski et al.
(2003) and Staveren (2003) suggest a mix of these variables plus reciprocity
norms. Zhao (2002), on the other hand, only operationalizes social capital as
network contacts. Grootaert (2001) ﬁnds a whole palette of indicators and index
values (including the unemployment criminality, and suicide rates and the
percentage of illegitimate children) that are included, with differing
weighting, in the measurement.

Putnam himself
applied the social capital index (SCI), an instrument made up of 14 variables
which measure ﬁve groups of characteristics (Putnam, 2000: 291): (1) community
organizational life (ﬁve variables: percent of the population who served on
committees or served as ofﬁcers in local organizations, civic, and social
organizations per 1,000 inhabitants, average number of club meetings attended
last year, average number of group memberships), (2) engagement in public
affairs (two variables: turnout in presidential elections, attendance of local
public meetings), (3) community volunteerism (three variables: nonproﬁt
organizations per 1,000 inhabitants, average work on community projects,
average number of times volunteer work was performed), (4) informal stability
two variables) and, ﬁnally, two variables for social trust. The main focus of
the variables regarding community beneﬁts and contacts in the SCI correspond to
the conceptual linkage of the term social capital to the community: ‘‘In other
words, these 14 indicators measure related but distinct facets of
community-based social capital, and we have combined them into a single social
capital Index’’ (Putnam, 2000: 291). The variables are, however, not analyzed
for the community or personal level, but are attributed to larger units
(states).

There are three
prevailing views. First, according
to strict liberal view any kind of governmental support for social capital must
be rejected. Many of the exemplary networks arose in conﬂict with the state and
its institutions, namely with a clear emancipatory concern, against
governmental arbitrariness and for more decision-making powers for individual
citizens. Second, authoritarian
approach accepts social capital only in ‘‘orderly’’ forms. For the one side
tightly organized networks serve only to ‘‘overcome’’ the free market society,
for the other they serve the destruction of democracy. Both result in the
absolute power of the form of government dictatorship, which is the opposite of
the civil society and thus does not need social capital in terms of Putnam’s
theory. Here that type of ‘‘compliance’’ is required that was used, e.g., by
the ‘‘Subbotniks’’ (‘‘voluntary’’ unpaid work on Sunday in the USSR) or the
‘‘Reichsarbeitsdienst’’ in fascist Germany. Both could be counted as social
capital, but this would be virtually absurd in the background of a clear social
capital deﬁnition. The measurement of social capital in those uncivilian
contexts would be bringing eventually low scores of social capital by using the
SCI. The third, corporatist
approaches represent a middle course between liberal and authoritarian
deﬁnitions of social capital. Here it is possible that social capital can be
promoted, in its structure (e.g., through corresponding legal protection of
associations), indirectly (through tax breaks) and directly (through
governmental subsidies). In comparisons of societies we see again and again
that there is no contradiction between a high level of engagement for the civil
society and a high level of social welfare transfers. Even in the United States
many forms of civic engagement are directly and indirectly promoted by local
government, states, and federal agencies.

The current
development in the direction of the ‘‘Longevity Society’’ (Butler, 2008)
represents the greatest potential for the social capital. The increasing share
of healthy and ﬁt elderly, to the extent that they no longer have to provide
for their own livelihood and thus have more time for those relationships that
Putnam localizes in th ‘‘dense
networks,’’ can provide for the strengthening of social capital in a society
(cf. the entry ‘‘Civil society and the elderly’’). This is only rewarding,
however, when the premises for social capital are observed. If nothing else,
since the World Bank and the OECD consider social capital to be important for
development, the strengthening of respective infrastructures and networks will
remain in the discussion and practical recommendations will be sought. It is
self-evident that any kind of economic and democratic developments are
dependent on the sociocultural context conditions that are connected with
social capital. The strengthening of social capital in the communities is
necessary to facilitate an independent and self-supporting (endogenous)
development in local areas that extricates itself from dependence on subsidies
and from bureaucratic paternalism (through regional rulers, governmental
ministries as well as the World Bank and the OECD themselves, see Woolcock and
Naravan, 2000). For the future it is important to consider which aspects of the
variables that have been used to measure social capital up to now increase and
decrease, which of them will need to be supported, which are less relevant for the
future development, and which would tend to be detrimental.

If we regard the
theoretical considerations together with the quantitative and qualitative
ﬁndings and ask which characteristics informal groups, formal organizations or
networks should have if on the one hand they should strengthen the social
capital in their region and, on the other hand, be attractive and interesting
enough to bind individualized actors, there are four structural characteristics
that can be discussed for the future deﬁnition of social capital:

This provides
for the characteristic of bridging. Without the representation of different
social groups in the engagement, only bonding capital would be created.
Structures with a homogeneous status hardly provide the participants with
contact and recognition in their community. Necessary for this are rules like ‘‘one
man one vote’’ in order to equalize the internal power imbalances to accomplish
group goals. In traditional contexts activities are often initiated by
Gemeinschaften that are organized with a homogeneous status (according to
castes or classes) and thus do not necessarily form productive social capital.
Bourdieu’s analysis started here: his differentiating social capital used
exclusive networks and thus tended to function in an exclusionary manner.
Networks only form social capital as a common good for the civil society when
through heterogeneous groups and direct – personal – contacts the existing
networks (families, organizations) are made accessible for the neighborhood.
Furthermore, according to the ﬁndings of network research, heterogeneous groups
are more successful as a system because they are less redundant.

Without a free choice, group memberships
remain compulsory communities. We can only refer to social capital when a range
of engagement possibilities is discernible. If there is no choice between
different types of engagement there are fewer possibilities for decisionmaking
and the incentive for commitment sinks. Exclusive access, ‘‘lifelong’’
membership, a threat of sanctions against members who leave the group and
loyalty to directives are the opposite of optionality and narrow the scope for
decision-making. They lead to the principle of Folg schaft which is typical for
traditionalistic sects or uncivil governmentally organized services (especially
for national defense). Social capital does not evolve as well when the
commitment invested is not perceived as a personal choice.

social capital does not emerge without
societal recognition for voluntary involvement. The intensity of the
participation in non proﬁt actions must lead to an improvement of a person’s
position in the status framework in the community. This quasi beneﬁt represents
on the one hand an individually attributable value of social capital that
cannot be replaced by wage or wage compensation beneﬁts at present. If
involvement in nonproﬁt activities is
compensated by a wage-like low payment, this can have negative effects on the
status potential and on the social capital. On the other hand, the symbolic
‘‘proﬁt’’ has to be incorporated in the societal recognition, as it is by no
means self-evident as is the case with altruistic motives (e.g., the
mother-child-relationship). When actions that serve the group are presupposed
as understood (like in traditional societies), then the element of status
potential is lacking.

The conspiracy
of the Maﬁa, secret societies and intelligence services form the typological
antipode to transparency, which is necessary for the development of civic
involvement and thus of social capital. Groups of actors and nonproﬁt companies
that cultivate few personal relationships with their environment, where there
is a lack of clarity about their policies, jurisdictions, and the disposition
of their funds will hardly achieve a democratizing effect and not produce any
social capital. Activities that are relevant for social capital thus require
openness ‘‘from the beginning’’ as a matter of principle.

Differing
contexts will affect the social capital in each society and each community. A
promotion of groups or structures that are not transparent, do not offer status
potential, present themselves as without alternatives for the addressees and
allow little scope for making decisions (no optionality), and are closed for
other ethnic groups, castes, classes, age groups, as well as political and
religious persuasions (little heterogeneity) will not lead to the development
of economic and political contexts and contradict the concept of social
capital.

[16] The World Bank. (1998). The Initiative on deﬁning, monitoring and
measuring social capital. Overview and program description, social capital initiative working paper no.
1, The World Bank, Washington, DC, iii.

Its Kaleidoscope

A cotraveler who seats endlessly on a chair that we tend to call world and moves through wonder places. Try not to move from the chair, transcending time. Try to unearth silences and capture through multiple lenses. Behind the corner of my eyes there are things I can not see... things I do not understand...
So here I am with words to share and become a cotraveler from my being. Yes, so many things to express but not genuinely gifted with skills.